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Apple to Launch Music Service?
discstickers writes "The San Jose Mercury News is running an article about an Apple music service that might be ready to launch next month. $.99 a song with the ability to burn to CD doesn't sound too bad."
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From the LA Times:
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
when CDs can often be found for $10-12 or even less
Not sure where you're shopping, but popular CDs are running $14.99 around here (DC area) - you have to go to the used CD stores or the bargain bins to get down into the $10 range - and the used stores are only $2 or so cheaper than the new ones around here.
Besides, when was the last time you bought an album for the album and not just a couple of songs? Meatloaf? Pink Floyd? There aren't that manny artists producing thematic albums, instead of "compilations of 3-5 minute songs we just wrote."
I'd pay $0.99 a track to create my own version of someone's Greatest Hits.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
The files will be in AAC format according to other reports. Quicktime handles it and so will the next iTunes (and therefore the Mac iPod). So if you have an AAC decoder/player you should be in luck, but there is no indication that the files will be converted into MP3 via iPod or iTunes.
The LA Times article says that the AAC files can be DRM locked, but that Apple has required that they can be burned onto a CD, which would unlock them.
Or for that matter, music selection. It only mentions that it will only be available to people with Mac AND iPOD, whatever that means. Where did the poster get this information? We really need to have a moderation system for articles, with karma influencing bonus @slashdot or something.
Here in Canada we can now make copies of CDs legally. I borrow my friends CD, copy it, and give it back to him. My copy is perfectly legal thanks to the blank media levy that was introduced. I'm not sure it's worth it, though.
Key difference: Listen.com requires windows. Apple is doing this to make an apple version, because there has been little effort on the part of 3rd parties to cater to apple users.
You say
AAC (it's known as mp4 because it's the "official" baseline audio standard for the MPEG-4 bitstream) is worse than LAME 3.91 encoded mp3 at high bitrates, even the high complexity branch, especially with VBR streams which AAC can't really do well - at ~256kbps you'd be better off with Ogg Vorbis (if you can tell the difference at -q8 or even -q7 (224kbps nominal) in an ABX double-blind test, it's a bug, report it), mp2 (you know, MPEG-1 audio layer II, as seen on VCDs, only at a higher bitrate?) or, even better, MPC (based loosely off of MPEG-1 audio layer II then improved, currently reaches perceptually lossless at lower bitrates than any other codec, although because of its piebald heritage, patent issues cloud its adoption -and it stinks at low bitrates, which it wasn't designed for).
AAC beats mp3 by only about 10-20% in listening tests - it's trounced by RealAudio 9 (at very low bitrates), WMA7 (at high bitrates), WMA8 (at low bitrates only thanks to a bug that causes the "metal" sound), WMA9 (at all bitrates, particularly good for classical), WMA9 Pro (160kbps is its bottom end and it does hyperstereo better than anything else until Vorbis gets n-channel coupling), mp3pro (at low bitrates, noticably warmer than the original though), MPC (at high bitrates) and Ogg Vorbis, which happily poops all over both AAC and MP3 (and I'd put them in the same class) at all bitrates and gives all the others at least a run for their money.
Note that this is the best case. There are a lot of frightfully bad AAC encoders, and only really one or maybe two good ones. Use a bad encoder, and- seriously - you'd have been better off with Xing.
AAC was tuned for the 32-64kbps per channel range, not the high fidelity range. And the only codecs that are really noticeably better than MP3 at high bitrates are MPC, MP2 and maybe, maybe Vorbis - there's little or no difference between most of them at the high end, it's at the 64kbps per channel range and below that the codecs' relative qualities start to separate them...